Happy International Blasphemy Rights Day

September 30, 2011

Happy International Blasphemy Rights Day! There are thousands of ways to commemorate this day—almost as many as there are prophets who have claimed the title of messenger from the gods.

But if you’re not involved in other IBRD activities, the simplest way recommends itself: just state there is no god. A straightforward denial of the divine is at the heart of blasphemy. Moreover, making this assertion is a useful reminder that until recently in human history such an assertion could get you killed almost anywhere on the planet. In some areas, it still has this effect.

Atheists are sometimes accused of taking delight in the shock or outrage they can elicit from believers. I can’t speak for everyone, but the reverse is true for me and many others. We long for the day when a denial of god produces nothing more than a shrug—when the gods have ceased to have any relevance.

Unfortunately, we’re not there yet. One reason mere assertions of disbelief can still cause surprise and shock, at least in the United States and some other religiously intoxicated countries, is that many believers think that atheists are as rare as snowflakes in July (outside of Buffalo). We need to disabuse the religious of this mistaken belief. We want to lessen the shock they experience when someone points out the obvious and asserts there is no superbeing in the sky or existing somehow as an undetectable spirit—when they hear the emperor has no clothes.

So don’t deny god just to be true to your own beliefs— do it for them.

Comments:

#1 Matt (Guest) on Friday September 30, 2011 at 8:03pm

I have asked this question before with silence as the reply. I am curious to see what the CFI “position” is on the origins of matter and energy before the big bang. To have any sort of response to this is….. Something. Are we saying that “something” has always existed? Are we saying that somehow “something” came from nothing? Doesn’t this seem like a greater leap of faith than to entertain the existence of a creator? How can one declare definitively that there is no God with so little evidence that there isn’t ? Is it more a disbelief and rejection of the Genesis account?Please help me with a real answer to your
position…Thanks, MJH

#2 Spinoza (Guest) on Saturday October 01, 2011 at 3:56am

“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.

The most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.

And this mysticality is the power of all true science.”

Albert Einstein.

Modern physics, in the hands of Albert Einstein, has turned almost into mysticism.

Nobody has noted the fact, because mystics don’t understand modern physics and the physicists do not care about the mystics.

The mystics have always experienced that they are one, but nobody has listened to them.

Perhaps man was not mature enough to understand the depth of their declaration.

The mystics have simply expressed the oneness of all.

Physicists go into detail.

Albert Einstein, especially, was the first scientist to come to the conclusion that time is the fourth dimension of matter.

Matter has three dimensions, the fourth dimension is invisible and that is time, but it is not separate from matter.

Modern physics has declared – without declaring the death of matter – that there is no matter at all.

With the disappearance of matter and with the death of God, only one energy remains in the whole cosmos.

Now time and space cannot be two.

They have to be expressions of one energy.

Spacetime.

But the mind can succeed only as far as science is concerned, it cannot succeed in religious consciousness.

One has to understand that the methodology that works for the outer cannot work for the inner.

Simply because the inner is the opposite dimension, the same methods will not be applicable.

You will have to find new methodology for the inner.

And that is meditation.

The mind cannot understand that which is beyond words; it can understand only that which is linguistically, logically right.

It can only conceive very limited things.

It has no intelligence of its own; it is a memory system.

You feed it certain information, it will keep it on record.

Whenever you want, it will supply it.

An intelligent man’s mind is capable of containing all the information that is in all the libraries of the world – it is almost infinite.

But mind is simply a collection of memories of the past, and – out of those memories – imagination about the future.

Understanding this whole process, one thing becomes certain: why the mind avoids the present, which is the real, and why it tries to get involved with past and future, which are not real.

God is a need for the mind, because the mind cannot conceive infinite, eternal things.

God simply is not there.

A man of meditation knows there is no God other than life itself.

God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.

God exists because you are not aware of yourself.

The moment you know yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God.

When I say there is no God, I am not saying that I disbelieve in God; even for disbelief, God has to be.

I am simply saying there is no God, has never been – all definitions are inventions.

When you come to reality there is no negativity, no positivity.

So there is no question of atheism or theism.

The whole world of polarities is transcended.

But the mind cannot conceive how contradictions can meet, how polarities can be one.

Yet in existence they are meeting, they are one.

Reality is herenow.

Osho - The God Conspiracy.
The Transmission Of The Lamp.

#3 Matt (Guest) on Saturday October 01, 2011 at 12:08pm

Thank you for your response; A couple of thoughts: Your claim that the “present is the only reality” is interesting because, in theory (and quite literally), the “present” can only be expressed as the smallest known unit of time; otherwise we can only be talking about the past or the future which you claim not to be real.
I think the larger struggle for humanity is simply trying to differentiate between “what is believed” and “what is known”. Religious and “non-religious” alike, know very little (relatively speaking) and must therefore depend on belief (often presented as knowing). Faith is faith however it is branded. Best, MJH

#4 Thomas (Guest) on Monday October 03, 2011 at 7:39am

Matt, if you really want a more in depth conversation, you ought to take your question to the Forum. I’m sure you’d get lots of answers there.

My feeling is that the universe always existed in some form or another, even if it was only a “potential to exist”. Some event that I’m not sure of caused this potential to become reality. I don’t think this is a greater leap of faith that believing in a Creator, because a Creator would be much more… an intelligent potential that somehow always existed.

But for the most part, I don’t concern myself too much with worrying about how the universe originated. My immediate question is: Do I have any reason to think there is a God at work in my life? And the honest answer is No.

#5 Matt (Guest) on Monday October 03, 2011 at 8:27am

These are the things truly worth wrestling with - thanks for your response and honesty.

Best, MJH

#6 Spinoza (Guest) on Tuesday October 04, 2011 at 6:17am

There is no God, but the universe is fully conscious; it is pure consciousness.

Consciousness is always of the present.

But the mind cannot conceive infinite, eternal things, so what ever we think, it is bound to be limited.

The mind can only conceive very limited things.

It cannot conceive a beginningless universe, an endless universe, just eternity to eternity.

Because mind cannot conceive that vastness.

With your concept of God, where is he existing? outside reality? outside this moment of life itself? what the mystics have always experienced as the oneness of life, and the genius of Albert Einstein realized as Spacetime - Spinoza’s God. ( Life itself)

There exists no evidence for any God, and no theologian in the whole of history has been able to give a single proof for the existence of God.

The truth is that God himself is a creation of man’s imagination.

Then who created the universe?

Have you ever thought that God will not solve the question.

On the contrary, the question will be pushed a step back: who created God?

If there was somebody already to begin it, then you cannot call it the beginning, somebody was already there.

Do you see the simple arithmetic?

Any hypothesis that does not destroy the question is absolutely useless.

Any answer that keeps on pushing the question further back but does not touch it at all, is not the answer.

There is no need of any creator because that creator will require another creator, and you will fall into an absurd regress.

Those who have risen beyond mind have also risen beyond God simultaneously.

The whole existence is intelligent, caring, compassionate, loving, but it is not a person.

You don’t have to worship it, you don’t have to pray to it.

Those things are only associated with the fiction of God.

Giving personality to God is your projection.

Existence is not a creation by anybody, there is no need for anybody to begin it, because there is no beginning to this universe, and there is no end.

And remember, if it had any beginning, then there would certainly be an end.

Every beginning is a beginning of an end.

Every birth is the beginning of death.

Existence is autonomous, it exists on its own.

Existence remains always in the present.

It is not limited in any way; it is unlimited, infinite and eternal.

(Even Cosmologists are realizing this - google “There Was No Big Bang!” or We Live in a Universe that Endlessly Expands and Contracts)

Existence does not write any scriptures and does not give any commandments.

Existence does not tell you what to do and what not to do.

Existence is absolutely non-judgmental.

It is as compassionate to the sinner as to the saint, it makes no difference, because in the eyes of existence everything that is natural is beautiful.

There are skies beyond skies; there is no end to existence, it has no boundary.

When you were not here, it was there.

When you will not be here, it will be here.

We come and go; we are just waves in this vast ocean of existence.

We come and go, existence remains.

To find that which remains is the ultimate truth.

Oso The God Conspiracy.

#7 Matt (Guest) on Tuesday October 04, 2011 at 10:18am

Thanks for your reply - your writing is pleasing to read and has a poetic flare to it. I will agree that there is no proof (in a Sciene 101 sense) that God exists - but there is no proof in a similar sense that He does not exist. This is where it becomes difficult to read statements that claim to be unequivically true; “The truth is that God himself is a creation of man’s imagination”.

This was the point I was making earlier talking about the differences between believing and knowing something - Particulary if we are in search of objectivity in “waters” that simply require faith.

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Ron Lindsay is senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry, having previously served as president and CEO from 2008 to 2016. Prior to joining CFI, he was in private legal practice in Washington, D.C. for twenty-six years. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. Among other works, he is the author of Future Bioethics: Overcoming Taboos, Myths, and Dogmas (Prometheus 2008), the entry on “Euthanasia” for the International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Wiley Blackwell 2013), and The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What To Do (Pitchstone Publishing 2014).